With the advent of digital photography, consumers are amassing large collections of digital images and videos. The average number of images captures with digital cameras per photographer is still increasing each year. As a consequence, the organization and retrieval of images and videos is already a problem for the typical consumer. Currently, the length of time spanned by a typical consumer's digital image collection is only a few years. The organization and retrieval problem will continue to grow as the length of time spanned by the average digital image and video collection increases.
A user desires to find images and videos containing a particular person of interest. The user can perform a manual search to find images and videos containing the person of interest. However this is a slow, laborious process. Even though some commercial software (e.g. Adobe Photoshop Album by Adobe Systems Inc.) allows users to tag images with labels indicating the people in the images so that searches can later be done, the initial labeling process is still very tedious and time consuming.
Face recognition software assumes the existence of a ground-truth labeled set of images (i.e. a set of images with corresponding person identities). Most consumer image collections do not have a similar set of ground truth. In addition, face recognition generally requires a training stage where a user would need to label many images from her collection. This labeling stage is tedious and time-consuming. Many users would desire some ability to search through their image collections based on the identities of the people in the images, with little or no work on their part to prepare their image collection.
There exist many image processing packages that attempt to recognize people for security or other purposes. Some examples are the FaceVACS face recognition software from Cognitec Systems GmbH and the Facial Recognition SDKs from Imagis Technologies Inc. and Identix Inc. These packages are primarily intended for security-type applications where the person faces the camera under uniform illumination, frontal pose and neutral expression. These methods are not suited for use with personal consumer image collections due to the unfriendly workflow.